RE: battle-plan for 2.5 development

[Ralph Little]

Hi,
I agree with all of that.
When I said that I found Cygwin installation clunky, I actually didn't
find it a big problem.
Being a programmer, I shouldn't really ;)

It just seems to me that any "perceived" barrier to installation ease
should be reduced to encourage more general acceptance of the software.
Also, I'm not sure what would be involved with "boxing up" Lily for easy
one-shot installation from a CD.

However, I wholeheartedly agree with your assertion that the biggest
bridge to cross is the non-mousey nature of the software, which is
doubly large for non-techy musicians that have not encountered
programming work. This could be tackled by some kind of online
interactive tutorial that the user could launch into after installation.
I would imagine that the first few minutes of use are crucial in
convincing the skeptical user that this is the route they should be
taking.

What I would think that most users are interested in is:
        * Speed
        * Quality of output
        * Learning curve

If we can visibly overcome these perceived issues then I can see mass
takeup of this superb software...

Another issue for prospective users is the pace of change of Lilypond,
especially in terms of the syntax.
Even for a user like myself (and many other) that tries to stay
up-to-date, the pace of change can be quite breathtaking.

I have seen comments from Han-Wen and others regarding the probably
stabilisation of the syntax now, which is a good thing for users
generally and removes a potential barrier to upgrade.

Regards,
Ralph

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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mats Bengtsson [mailto:address@hidden 
> Sent: 17 November 2004 13:14
> To: Ralph Little
> Cc: address@hidden
> Subject: Re: battle-plan for 2.5 development
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Ralph Little wrote:
> > Hi,
> > Undeniably the mass market at the moment would look to be 
> using Windoze
> > as a platform.
> > If we could see an end to dependance on Cygwin, that would 
> (partly) open
> > the door to mass acceptance of Lilypond by the general public.
> > Certainly if, as Erik says it could be boxed up for one-step
> > installation so that the Cygwin layer were packaged up with 
> it, novice
> > users would find it more acceptable.
> > 
> > I did try to install Cygwin once in the past just to see what it was
> > like and it was clunky to say the least.
> 
> Really? I've experienced many Windows programs that are much more
> tricky to install than cygwin. I think that the actual installation
> is a minor problem compared to the mental steps going from mouse
> based windows programs to the text based input of LilyPond.
> Now when you can simply double-click on a file to process it, most
> windows users will only need to open the cygwin command window when
> they have upgraded LilyPond and have to run convert-ly.
> 
> I know that feature requests shouldn't go to this mailing thread, but
> how about adding an option in the right-click menu to run convert-ly
> on the file?
> 
> > Ordinary users just don't want that hassle. A lot of issues 
> raised on
> > the users groups seem to be related to Cygwin and getting it up and
> > running.
> 
> 
>     /Mats
> 

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